The Road

It’s Monday morning and I’m in my default position of lying in bed in my found pink dressing gown with my legs stretched out in front of me and my laptop on my lap and a pot of lovely loose leaf jasmine green tea beside me. In my head is the thought of relaxing, and of writing up my two blogs, and tiredness of a busy week just gone. The need for a day of rest.

A busy week just gone. Three or four university deadlines. Four or five games of squash. Refereeing Saturday and Sunday and then five-a-side last night with an extra hour with the boys afterwards until the lights went off, just for fun. So stiff as a bastard today and in need of some nothing. No deadlines. No work. No running and diving and sweating. Just tea and chill.

Refereeing is surprisingly exhausting: maybe even more so than playing. Very rarely get a break. And such concentration for the full ninety minutes, always got to be switched on, aware, looking about you, can’t miss a thing. I must be mad to plan doing it TWICE on a Sunday and then go out and play five-a-side.

Thirty-six a week today. But better to wear out than rust away.

And university deadlines – and writing in general – perhaps a breakthrough there. Handed in a piece I felt couldn’t possibly get me good marks. And in that, glee. The pressure off. Always I put in a modicum of effort and I get a mark somewhere around a first. It makes me think then about putting in decent effort – which, academically, is something I can rarely be bothered to do – it feels like selling out, like playing some stupid game I’m really not interested in, beings a marks whore. It gets my head in a twist. Relaxing and not worrying about marks, of course, means that you can do whatever you want and let the chips fall where there will. As long as I don’t fail who cares whether I score fifty or sixty or seventy? I shouldn’t think anyone will. So maybe one of these projects’ll come back sixty and I can it all go and just have my fun. Which is what I seem to be doing anyway.

But also writing: I get the feeling it’s falling away. The writing, at least, of dreaming of books, of wanting to be published, of wanting to be paid. Such hassle, such headaches – and so far away from my true core life base dreams of soul joys and enlightenment. Writing like this is fun, worthwhile, productive. But endlessly slaving over things I don’t care about to please a person I don’t care about and maybe make some dollars? I don’t see the point in that. My tutors, I feel, would be ecstatic if their students ended up working on Eastenders: that’s like the Holy Grail, I guess. But I couldn’t imagine anything worse. And why even desires of publishing and making it on that path? ‘Twas the death of Kerouac – and look how much life I’ve wasted in pursuing that goal. Once I had light and the light was the best thing I ever had and I traded it in for the world and its riches. And I didn’t even get those. I got sidetracked, I guess.

So now I’m thinking of moving in purer circles, just enjoying the outlay here and forgetting of polish and gleam. Freedom, harmony more important in reality. Ideas always of quitting the world once more and heading for the roads, sneaking in through the woods, being once more a beacon of evolving spirituality ensconced, perhaps, in my Mexican hot springs canyon with sporadic blogging relating the life as it turns and unfolds. Let someone else figure out the essence of all these words. The twisted patterns and paths of this weird current incarnation. I pursue, and it’s all bobbins.

Unless it’s not, of course. But for that, I should need to meet a man I wanted to be, and then I would become him.

Been a long time since anything like that came into my life.

Maybe I am that man.

Writing. Clarity has entered into my thoughts about this the last few weeks – but it is a clarity I seem unable to express right here, right now. Which is of course massively amusing and ironic (I hesitate always to type that word, given how poor genius Alanis is forever crucified for it by nit-pickers and haters when the point is clear enough). Ironic? Yes, perhaps: you know what I mean. Writing for expression, for record, for moving on, for connection is grand. Writing for riches and dreams of never working again and seeking to be poetic and deep and respected is not. All the sweating of edits. All the wracking of brains for originality. Maybe I just don’t have it in me. Maybe it really is all just straw. Maybe there’s a reason that so many writers are drunks and weirdoes and messes. I follow no man who has not wisdom enough to not poison his own body: it speaks of a very low level of awareness.

Yes, meeting an inspirer would be grand. A man to light the way.

Or woman, I suppose. ;-)

But back in the real world: I played a squash match in a league I’m in and I think it was the best squash match I’ve ever played. We were so evenly matched. Rallies would go on forever. So much power and sweat. Two men just hammering away at each other, gladiatorial, ancient. I don’t normally break between games, even when going for two hours, but this match I did. Five gruelling sets. Each set bar one going down to the last couple of points. 19-17 in one, a new personal record. And even though I think the guy was better than me I squeaked it out 15-12 in the fifth. Still, basically a draw, either one could’ve won it, no one deserving to lose.

I came off immensely satisfied and glad. Immediately knew “that was better than sex.” The feeling. The endorphins. The journey we had taken together. The ebb and the flow.

No homo-eroticism.

Just great.

I also read The Road this week. Probably leeched into me in some ways. Using more periods. More half-sentences. Starting in the middle. Ending before the end. Especially on the first few pages. Probably means something. Says something about the state of the world they live in. Perhaps. A bit awkward at first, I thought. But it grew on me. The style, I mean. The world of the post-apocalyptic wanderers I of course loved from the beginning.

I love that world and always have. Zombie flicks. The excellent Night of The Comet. The desolate empty London streets of 28 Days Later. So much promise, so much allure: it’ll probably be one of my greatest old man death bed regrets that I never saw it come to pass. I’ve been so convinced that we alive today will see those days – some nuclear Armageddon, the revelation, the Day of Judgement, the millennium and 2012. It’s been right there in our faces since the day we were born. George A. Romero and all those that followed. Asteroids and aliens. It seeps into the unconscious, the subconscious, and the conscious even and it forms and shapes a mind that expects it fully. Would I be surprised? Would those of you who are like me? No, not at all: we would accept it and say, right, what we need is cars and fuel and food and get to a safe place and find like-minded warrior survivors and get some weapons and secure the perimeter and think fast about growing food and in our huddled warrior enclaves make the long arduous trek to warmer climes battling danger and brain-eating masses. We would, of course, be the chosen ones: nobody imagines themselves beaten down and chomped on twenty minutes after the bomb drops. Nobody sees themselves going religiously mad and reverting to primitive forms of bone-beating worship and uggabugga.

The Road makes me think, hm, maybe my hot springs canyon in Mexico when all this degree is done for end of the world Mayan calendar malarkey might not be such a bad idea. Just in case, you know. New Age Armageddon dreams of my youth have almost died – but not quite. They are the last flickering coal in a fire used and done. But even one dying ember can spark the whole thing up again given the right type of fuel.

The Road is brutal and dark and not my vision of my own future post-apocalypse. Like I say, all is rosy in my world. We live up in the hot springs with our fresh water and our hot tubs and we grow food and frolic happily in the river. We say, God, isn’t it so much better without TV and money and all that wondering what we’re going to do in our old age and pensions and not feeling like madmen because we don’t worship shopping? There will be women and babies, and the men will be strong and bare-chested and whittle things and carry wood. When we get old and die we will burn the bodies and say, well that’s just life, I wonder what groovy adventure they’re on to now? Reminisce about happy times, silly things. Cry a little for the never seeing them again but mostly just get on with it. Children and sunshine and tossing balls in newly invented games in the present. Welcoming in those that find us all shell-shocked and saddened and saying, no, it’s all okay, sit yourself down and have a listen to what we believe, we think it’ll take the load off. No more amplified music or drum ‘n’ bass. No more drunkards in the street.

And me, of course, wiseman chief propheting and saying, yeah, right, good idea, I think that might work.

People with knowledge of seeds and people with other kinds of knowledge and attempting there to create something great and good now finally freed from shackles of materialism and the pressure of a society we don’t like because the society is now dead.

Though, of course, there’s no reason why I couldn’t do that now. Interesting that I don’t. I guess attached still to this society and things in it like squash and refereeing and Sainsbury’s and tea.

Interesting, interesting…

The Road was a good book, I think. It was a book powered, really, by the question that powers nearly all books: what happens next? We read it and we want to know, who will they encounter, how will they survive, will they find good guys or bad guys, what’s at the end of the road, sun or sea or what? There were moments when I knew that’s what was powering it and, in a way, it’s a bit like seeing through a con, because one should be more than merely a donkey following a carrot on a stick. Such is the power of literature. There were moments when it was just a guy and a kid walking along a road being cold and having dull conversations. You could strip it down to that, sure. There were moments, too, when I was saying, something better happen, this’ll be one hell of a lousy trick if it don’t. But those moments passed and the driving question drove on and, in any case, the imagining of the world after the world has passed is so compelling and stimulating that it takes over from the question of what happens next.

In the end, I didn’t want it to end: I wanted it to go on and on and to know about that world in totality – to bring it into existence – to answer every other question I had, about other countries, about the rest of that country, about the good guys and the bad guys and where it all would go.

Also because the ending answers the question and the answer is: nothing. Nothing happens next.

Other questions too about the world of the book itself, puzzling and unanswered loose ends I’d like cleared up by those smarter than me. Like…

How old was the boy? He talked like he was six or seven – but if he was running alongside the man and keeping up he must have been at the very least eleven or twelve. Kids are pretty slow at running compared to grown-ups.

That fires the next question: how had they survived all those years, given how difficult it was for them to survive just the few months that the book covers? The boy was just about to be born when the apocalypse hit – which means seven to eleven years of life not covered in post-apocalyptic circumstances.

Also, the woman killed herself when the boy was old enough to be told that she was going to do it. So one imagines at least three or four years of life with the three of them avoiding danger and finding shelter and food.

And then there’s the road itself. Why “the” road when presumably there are many roads? Why stay on that one given all the roads and towns and houses America has? And how come the road ends where it does? One imagines a major thoroughfare like that, when it hits the coast, will at least end in a smallish town, if not a major city, and not just an empty beach. Is it a real road? Given that they’re heading south and east I’m imagining Florida, or maybe the Carolinas – empty beach possibilities there?

Plus, where go all the others that pass them on the road? The big truck and the cannibals and the other groups that are ahead of them? And also the threat of a big crazy group behind them? Wouldn’t they all end up on that beach? Is that not the end of the road or have I missed something?

Finally, did the man die because he didn’t listen to the boy, wouldn’t help people he wanted them to help, perhaps wasn’t quite as good as he could have been? Many times he ignored the boy and if the boy was some sort of child divine I suppose he should have listened. Certainly, a couple of time he didn’t listen things went wrong. The man who finds the boy at the end had been tracking them for a while so presumably he could have made contact before the man died but chose not to. Seems a shame in a world of so few people still avoided each other. But I can’t say I’d do any different. Humanity, eh?

But I liked it that the boy was so unremittingly good and that he did always get taken care of even when he sometimes stumbled and starved and then, just like in real life, would receive some seemingly miraculous salvation just when he needed it most. Maybe if the man had tapped into that and followed the boy a bit more he could have lived too.

I didn’t want to write all that: seems a bit like the nit-picking I’ve been doing a lot of lately that I’d also decided this week to perhaps cut back on, recognising it’s not the most useful or attractive aspect of my personality. Probably just a mild form of lashing out at the world in order to make myself feel better. Spot and focus on imperfections out there so as to feel superior to something. Masking all the while my own failings as a creative and wannabe talent and turn instead to criticism, probably inherited from my mother. Thanks mom. Though it’s not your fault: a thousand generations of critics, no doubt, each one shaving a little bit off and becoming more and more aware. One day one of my great-grandchildren’s descendants will be free of it and the bloodline will be saved. Thus is karma worked out in the family as well as in the individual and the world as a whole. The more of us, the better to do so. The soul can inhabit more than one body at a time, I think: gets things done quicker that way.

I wonder where my soul’s other bodies are right now, what they’re up to…

Also this week I had the girlfriend mildly on my case, giving it a bit of the “do you love me?” kind of thing. “Define love,” I say, the boyfriend who doesn’t want to say no, who’s too honest to say yes, who doesn’t even know what this love thing is right now. Love I’ve felt in moments with practical strangers lying naked body to body holding back the urge to say it. I love you. I don’t even know you. I feel it. And now I know you, I don’t. Love a feeling that comes and goes? Love something that grows over time, only really there after decades, not possible before? Love a rare and splendid thing, beyond personalities such as mine? Love a thing, in actuality, that you do, not feel?

I keep it in. A part of me, sure, doesn’t want to share feelings. More than that, an intuition to be something else. She says she needs to talk – that we need to talk – but doesn’t. Okay, don’t. I sit there ready to listen. Nothing comes. Smalltalk. Games. Aha. Okay. This is something different: this is the aloof saying, we need to talk and then wanting you to do all the work. Previous me may have done. Me on another day. But this day – no. This day, I give it some time – time over dinner, time after – and when nothing comes I go do my thing, which is typing something for university for the morrow. Ha! Girlfriend don’t like that. But girlfriend eventually breaks through this aloofness shell and makes the move. Expresses what’s on her mind. Bridges the distance. The distance between us and the distance between the various parts of herself. It takes two minutes. Maybe five or ten sentences. Instantly, she feels better, the burden of a week or two gone and vanished. And a valuable lesson too: that if you want something it’s you that’s got to make it happen, one can’t sit around and sulk and play games and hope that doing so will bend the world to your will. Except, in many cases it works. But on this day not with me.

And then I pick up Mother Meera’s Answers Part 1, and there I see her define love as “doing for another what they need without expectations of reward.” Love as a doing thing, like M. Scott Peck concludes (I think). Love as tough love, as I’ve experienced many a time. Love that doesn’t even bring you immediate rewards – how easy to do the aloof’s work for them in order to bring about instant harmony and peace. But what benefit for them in the long-term? What lesson to be learned except that pouting and grumbling gets them what they want?

To be proactive. To take responsibility. To grab this world by the lapels and do with it what you want. Ain’t no one else gonna do it for you. And ain’t nothing stopping you doing what you want to do except yourself.

But – aha! you’ll say. What of you wanting to be published writer and it not happening? Nope: wanting to write. Published money thing just silly worldly inspired conventional extension of that. Like wanting to win lottery. Like wanting to be famous. Prime urge expression. Prime urge sharing of what’s within. All else, window dressing. All else, empty baubles.

Prime urge being satisfied right now.

And prime urge infinitely more satisfying than all these years of endless editing and fruitless chase and trying to craft something that who cares about anyway while the growth of my mind and my soul grinds to a halt – which is life’s true purpose, nothing else remembered beyond the death of this body which could take place tomorrow.

And so a new plan emerges: in nine months education as I see it will be finished. The body of Rory was born with a fairly decent brain and intended to follow a path that led to certain things. The path got lost in the woods, refound, and lost again. But now it has been located and we approach its weird end. BA check. MA check. A stint as a teacher. The circumnavigating of A-Levels. All those evolving dreams of my old grammar school that I dropped out of and how they disappeared when I first finally uni enrolled and how they developed over the years nodding approval on where I’m at and I think have now stopped. When MA done what more is there? Letters after the name evoking Yogananda’s own tortured schooling serving higher purpose. End of the educational road.

And writing. And writing dreams pursued to either glorious conclusion or bitter end – or, indeed, the middle path of glorious bitter neither success nor failing but rather conscious letting go having somewhat fulfilled in reality and further fulfilled in dreams. The observation of the path as walked by Kerouac and others. Joyce in thin-rimmed miserable spectacles writing slowly mad gibberish loved only by eggheads and alcoholics. Kesey in Cuckoo’s Nest triumph and then realising better actually to be welly-wearing farmer. Alpert more content with a smile. King and Carver sucking out the dregs from the bottle and saying, wow, this is shit and cleaning up their act. Harry Potter twelve times declined. Dan Brown the world over loved and then sitting unbought on ninety-nine pee charity shop shelves with nowhere to go but pulp and laughed at by brains. Dickens triumphing but the George Reynolds that in his day outsold him unheard of and not even in print. And all those writers who wrote their grand first novels and then published and sold substandard works because people are like sheep and they follow wherever they are pointed. The business. The Kerouac-destroying business. The madness of it all when all we really want to do is craft, create, put our minds on paper, explore the world and our thoughts, feel the joy of a flurry of fingers. But what if I had no fingers? What if typewriter/computer never invented? What then? Could I still find happiness and my soul? Buddha’s life impoverished any for the lack of printed word? And why no writing anyway for all the great souls, oh the Thomas I don’t remember (a Kempis? Merton? More?) and his handful of valueless straw? Sam Pepys. Anne Frank. Everybody else.

The point is, this is what I like. And I think wanting to be published and recognised has taken me away from life. And having wandered away from life I’ve not really had anything to talk about – when once I was out there inspiring and living and growing and roadtrippin’ and really had something to say. Now all I’ve become is a stuck record. Except what I feel is a man breaking free.

So here’s what we’ll do: in eight months this MA will be over. At that time something new will arise and I’ll do that. Or, if it doesn’t, I shall go back to exploring the globe and the universe and myself and maybe do that back out California way or in the hot springs canyon in Mexico. Or elsewhere. Or I’ll be a football referee in Yorkshire. Anyways. Whatever I’ll do I’ll write about it in long, interminable blog and worry not of audience or proofreading or mistakes or clarity because blog is for me and that’s the most important thing I can think of. In the meantime, we’ve time, if we’re able – and if the desire doesn’t vanish with the first tentative steps in the fulfilling of it – to accomplish things dreamed of. Write some stuff. Write silly quick books full of errors and publish them myself and leave them there for the world to discover or not discover if the world can be arsed. Kindle-ise them. Let them generate some little monies to take care of themselves while I get on with other things and maybe leave me a few hundred quid a year to supplement whatever other income I have while refereeing or massaging or chopping wood or digging holes. All the mad books I have in my brain that I could type out stupidly quick and not care for proper publishers and agents and their whims and my tutors and everybody fannying about living to power the machine when the machine should work for me. Why me got to wait for some big fat man to pull the lever when I’ve a life to live and there ain’t nothing any writer’s riches could bring me that could compare to the jewel-like kiss of a man’s own soul. I read the other day something I’d written years ago, about Lindsay the Welshman who is even now being a clown out in poor sad Japan and he’d said, “there’s nothing as beautiful as your own soul – so seek it.” I’d forgotten all about that. I don’t remember him saying it. But I’d written it down – wait, I think he wrote it to me in our farewell note – we were always writing each other farewell notes back then (it’s what we young New Agers did, one last chance to express gratitude and exchange compliments) – and it sort of stuck me. Because, oh yes, I did find my soul and it was actually the best thing ever. And I did sacrifice my earthly body and mind for it up Mount Shasta and that was real and true and now I knit my eyebrows for the thought of it, the boy I’ve become laying in a bed in Leeds with a mind full of internet and movies and football scores and girl’s titties and dreams of riches and nice cars and even mortgages and old age and – slowly, slowly, this past year or so, all those are dying inside me the more I look at them and the more I am able to see the end of the road where they lead. One only need walk a few miles of the M1 to realise its nature, to fairly confidently predict that even two hundred miles further on it will be made of blacktop and ran over by screaming cars. And enough evidence all around to reveal whether light at end of tunnel or not. But dull our observational skills are, as a whole.

Well. Clarity and singularness have failed me again. Also once more making up words. One day perhaps return to a point of making myself understood. If I was ever at that point. Sticking to football and squash and the simple things of a week in a life in Leeds instead of meandering off into musings of the soul and distant plans perhaps as empty as the million other plans long-forgotten and died. Life, in reality, a mixture of sport, of eating, of farting, of shopping, of navigating a relationship, of getting your dick sucked, of drinking bucketloads of tea, of wrestling with academics, and of typing typing typing. And dreaming, always, of a canyon in Mexico. Of plotting the best way through it all from moment to moment. Of being a football referee. Of playing guitar. Of battling dead poets. Of spitting into the wind. Of howling at the mirror. Of smiling quietly inside and amused by everything. Of stupid overreactions to the tiniest little thing. Of the memories of women gone. Of pissing and shitting and wiping one’s arse. Of my little basement window and the everchanging gloom and sun outside. Of crisp and cheese sandwiches. Of not worrying about money. Of Greece collapsing and people on the radio saying things are really bad. Of crashing Italian boats. Of naughty sea captains. Of not understanding art. Of yet another gibberish paragraph.

But don’t you know the whole of human history and evolution is a seed inside me and you? That I sit atop a pyramid that contains the universe, and that I am in your pyramid, that you are in mine?

The road ends here. The road stretches on. The road loops around and leads back upon itself. Like a cheap Scalextric figure-of-eight.